Wenping Gao, PhD, Associate Professor of English, from Dept of English, School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.

Wenping Gao served as Chair of the Dept during the years 2002-2008. His research interests include literary theories and translation studies. He has published monographs on the status of intellectuals and religious revivals in China. The Dept of English has well kept a tradition of studying English literature from the perspective of the Sense of Nativeness (in Gary Snyder’s term) since the late 80s of the last century. Wenping Gao’s has newly compiled a collection of such studies of British and American literature entitled Sense of Nativeness and Studies of Literature. Wenping Gao’s PhD dissertation focused on the aesthetic and cultural critique of the early Frankfurt School in the context of postmodern responses. His primary research plan in his visit of Columbia University is to rewrite it into Chinese under the supervision of Prof. Andreas Huyssen. Wenping Gao is also well-known first-rate conference translator (simultaneous interpreter) in the Greater China, where he’s accumulated in-depth and rich experiences in his understanding of the different industries, notably finance and I.T. The experiences give rise to his forthcoming book entitled The Limit of Language to come out in the first half of 2013. The practical encountering of the economic, scientific and technological fields eventually lead to his research proposal here in Columbia University on technological aesthetics where he aims at probing the interrelationship between art, literature, or culture in general with the logic of technology and commodities.